Faculty News & Notes

Scholarship in Progress: Sheer Ganor on the Transnational Diasporic Network of Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany and Its Annexed Territories

More than 400,000 German-speaking Jews fled antisemitic violence in Central Europe between Hitler’s rise to power and the end of the Second World War. Much of the historiography of these refugees, according to Sheer Ganor (Assistant Professor, History), focuses on the study of refugee communities in particular geographies, or on particular professional groups or intellectual communities, or on the story of individual refugees. Still other studies take a comparativist approach, looking at two or three locales and their respective refugee communities. By contrast, Ganor’s book-

Sheer Ganor in-progress, “In Scattered Formation: Displacement, Alignment and the German-Jewish Diaspora,” takes a more explicitly transnational approach, and rather than focusing on limited timeframes associated more immediately with the experience of dislocation and displacement, she takes the long view, stretching her analysis into the postwar decades, following the experience of refugees and their families into the more recent period “when the experience of displacement transitioned from a lived experience to a commemorated one.” “Rather than an event susceptible to description by clear starting and ending points,” Ganor argues, “displacement is a condition that permeates across life spheres well beyond the physical act of forced removal. After transience and mobility, in settlement and aging, the displaced carried the condition within themselves.” Although it is estimated that no more than 5% of German-speaking Jewish refugees returned to live in Central Europe after the Second World War, Ganor asserts that “it would be wrong to assume, based on these numbers, that German-speaking Jews disavowed their previous homelands and severed their attachment to them.” Rather, the low rate of return suggests that “German-speaking Jews were longing for something that they did not believe could be attained again . . . the defeat of Nazism could hardly return what was already gone.” Instead, Ganor explains, “displaced German-speaking Jewry actively invested in carving out spaces where it could maintain a collective particularism rooted in German culture and informed by the historical experience of a Jewish minority group.” Ganor’s study relies on primary and archival sources originating from private collections of former refugees, official German records from the Nazi period and the postwar era, government records of recipient countries, and the records of various refugee aid organizations. Her source base, gathered from archives throughout the U.S., England, Mexico, Israel, South Africa, and Germany, includes private diaries and correspondences, family photo albums and home videos, emigration and asylum papers, household objects, legal records from reparations courts, reunion memorabilia, music albums, published and unpublished manuscripts, restaurant menus, and more. As she notes, “The archives of the German-Jewish diaspora are filled with collections . . . where routine instances of the everyday are kept alongside evidence and chronicles that testify to the grave reality of genocide and forced migration.” Ganor weaves together these sources, wherein physical possessions act as “multidimensional currency for the displaced, providing a material safety net as well as physical remnants from a vanishing world,” in order to uncover “an everyday history of displacement and of diaspora-making.” Reflecting on her methodology, Ganor observes of her sources that “this seemingly contradictory duality, wherein quotidian normalcy remains an integral component of crisis, provided a conceptual drive in the realization of this project.” Ganor’s book aims to depict the process by which the displaced population of German-speaking Jews reconstituted itself as a global diaspora, capturing the contours of life in the aftermath of forced migration, their efforts to preserve a cultural identity threatened with extinction, and the lived tensions that emerged over time as a result of these developments. Spanning five continents and the period from 1933 to the end of

the twentieth century, her study examines how this displaced community grappled with its collective identity-in light of violent persecution, dislocation, and genocide--as both German and Jewish. In doing so, she defines displacement as a dynamic field, illuminating the ways in which diasporic communities evolve across time. Her scholarship is guided by three key analytical threads. The first insists on viewing displacement as a lived experience: “It compels us to see displaced people as multidimensional subjects with a past and a future beyond the immediate moment of removal.” In the second thread, Ganor explores the consequences whereby

Forced migration and genocide created unique circumstances wherein far more German-speaking Jews lived outside of their native homelands than within them. Decades after National Socialism, German-speaking Jewry remained in its essence a diaspora; and unlike most dispersed populations, this diaspora had no metropole and no existing space to yearn for as a home. Displacement and dispersion, I argue, were the defining characteristics of German-speaking Jewry during the majority of the twentieth century.

The third thread elaborates the coherence of the German-Jewish diaspora. Diasporas by nature operate as complex and variegated networks, Ganor explains, but “they are also built around a set of ideas that bind their constituents together – a shared history, culture and a claim to values that become amplified in the process of diasporic formation.” In her study, Ganor argues that this coherence was born out of the pressures of balancing Jewishness and Germanness in light of and in the aftermath of the Holocaust:

Isolated and banished, the displaced nevertheless resisted denouncing their affinity with German culture, language, and history. Although they had been forcibly removed from a geographic landscape, they remained embedded in a mental one that continued to play a crucial role in shaping their postmigration lives. The tension between German-speaking Jews’ continued attachment to their lost homes and the irreparable sense of grief and betrayal that was unleashed in these places echoes throughout the study, as it resonated across the German-Jewish diaspora.

Ganor’s research this fall, archival work that was put on hold for two years because of the pandemic (which similarly slowed progress on the book because of the increased demands pandemic conditions imposed on teaching and supporting her students), will focus on analyzing the cultural spaces that emerged across the diaspora: “In these spaces – cafés, vacation resorts, youth clubs and others – exiled communities found a network of material and emotional support that was crucial to navigating life after removal.” While these spaces fostered an atmosphere of familiarity, continuity and belonging, she suggests, “they simultaneously developed a routinized sociability that ultimately helped embed displaced people into their new surroundings.” In highlighting this latter aspect, Ganor hopes “to push against a common understanding of such spaces as cultural enclaves that keep immigrant communities isolated and insulated.” Ganor plans to travel this fall to Berlin to review the private collection of Valeska Gert who, after escaping German in 1938, founded a popular bar in Manhattan, the Beggar Bar, an establishment “simultaneously meant to preserve the threatened European cabaret culture and to offer a home base for the bohemian clientele of Greenwich Village.” She will also travel to the Pestalozzi School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which was established in 1934 and is still active today. Although it was founded by a German immigrant of a previous generation and not by Nazi-era refugees, German-Jewish refugees were attracted to the Pestalozzi School for its explicit opposition to Hitler, while other German-speaking schools in Argentina often promoted Nazi ideology. Children of Jewish refugees became the largest group of students in the school. During her visit, Ganor plans to view the school’s archive and to conduct interviews with former students and staff. Ganor’s book, as currently planned, ends with the children, or rather with the interfamilial relationships between migrant parents and their children, and with the parents’ “realization that German-Jewish culture, as they had come to know it, might be lost to posterity.” If all that is left are communicated memories and possessions, the latter moving from the home to museums, Ganor asks, “Does the shift from a lived experience to a commemorated experience mark the end of the German-Jewish story?” She observes, “Children are a tangible link to the future. But what happens when raising children confronts parents with the possible dissolution of their own pasts?”